Author Archive for: anna

We are following up our sprint in Athens on the new EngageMedia.org skin with another sprint, this time for Critical Commons, a video site built using Plumi that is a collaborative online teaching tool for cinema studies, and a project designed to push the boundaries of fair use in an educational context.

On Critical Commons an educator can upload clips, attach commentaries and build lectures based on these clips. Other users can add commentaries to existing clips throughout the library. Clips can be embedded on other websites, and the site also forms a media repository for the Scalar open-source media-rich scholarly publishing platform.

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for scholarship, research and teaching, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. (www.criticalcommons.org)

Currently I’m working here in Athens with Unweb, in collaboration with Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer from Critical Commons, to produce a new version of the website based on the latest version of Plumi. Code we develop will be available on the Plumi GitHub repository.

EngageMedia.org is the media and technology activism organisation based in the Asia-Pacific region, which initiated the Plumi video-sharing application in 2006. Plumi is currently maintained by EngageMedia in conjunction with Unweb.me, who have been the primary developers of Plumi since 2009. Unweb are also comrades from our days as part of the Indymedia network.

In the coming weeks EngageMedia is undertaking a re-design of our video-sharing website focused on social justice and environmental video in the Asia Pacific. We have been limited in terms of our design to something close to the look of an older version of the Plone content management framework on which Plumi, our free software video sharing application, is based. Changes we are working on now in Plumi are enabling us to separate the design from the content management system, and have a freer approach to create the kind of user-interface people expect from today’s online video applications.

We’re using Diazo to re-theme EngageMedia.org and Plumi. Diazo “allows you to apply a theme contained in a static HTML web page to a dynamic website created using any server-side technology. With Diazo, you can take an HTML wireframe created by a web designer and turn it into a theme for your favourite CMS, redesign the user interface of a legacy web application without even having access to the original source code, or build a unified user experience across multiple disparate systems..”.

I’m currently in Athens with Unweb. It’s very hot in Athens, but we’re hiding inside from the heat, getting deeper into the new design and functionality required for our new look. I’m here working with Dimitris, Christos and Markos from Unweb. Yiannis, our designer and front-end developer has joined us in Athens, and is now working with us from the Netherlands. Mike from Unweb has come to work with us this week.

Unweb are not only great programmers, but excellent cooks! As is their housemate Nikos. We will have produced a lot of code and consumed a lot of food by the end of our sprint

Why Athens, you may ask? Well, Unweb are based in Greece. Lucky for me!

Normally we work together online, but I happen to be here in Athens to work with them on another project based on the Plumi video-sharing app, called Critical Commons. This is an online cinema educational tool originally built by myself, Infinite Recursion and EngageMedia for theInstitute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (a project developed by Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer). It’s also a project designed to push the boundaries of fair use in an educational context, challenging the legal limitations copyright places on distributing film clips online. It also forms the multimedia backbone for Scalar, an open-source platform for media-rich scholarly publishing.

For the EngageMedia re-design, we’re also looking at re-engineering the way video activists interact with the site, in terms of building better steps towards activism and advocacy into the user-interface. Basically we want to encourage users to take the next step after watching a video – whether that’s finding out more info on the issue, taking part in discussions, finding others who are active around the issues and taking part in social movements, and/or taking direct action. This will all happen in the next stage of the re-design.

For now we’re focusing on a new skin for EngageMedia.org, from which we will base a new Plumi skin, available for all to download, modify and use for their own video-sharing sites.

This version updates Plumi to Plone 4.2. Changes include deployment as a WSGI app and asynchronous execution of jobs via plone.app.async, separating the video uploading process from the database, which should mean stability improvements in the uploading system. The load balancer has been removed, buildouts have been simplified, and the beta also includes a new publish form with a video file upload progress indicator, a big step forward in terms of usability.

4.4-final includes some changes after the beta to the transcoder, the new video publish form, and fixing bugs with playback on the iPhone and iPad (playback now works very well in the latest iOS).